Many confectionaries are coated with a flavored candy coating. The coating helps to preserve the confectionary, imparts a desired eye-appeal and adds flavor. Bakery produced cakes, ice cream bars and popsicles, candy pieces and candy bars are conventionally coated with such flavored coatings. While these coatings can be flavored with any desired natural or artifical flavor, they are most often flavored with cocoa or cocoa butter to form a chocolate flavored coating.
Chocolate coatings can be produced in the traditional way of making milk chocolate. This process, however, requires a rather expensive ingredient, i.e. cocoa butter. For this reason and for other reasons, milk chocolate candy coatings are relatively expensive and are not used on popularly priced confectionaries and in lieu thereof a compound coating is used. Compound coatings do not require a cooking step and are, generally speaking, simply a mechanical mixture of, principally cocoa, sugar and fat.
As can be appreciated, the solid ingredients and the fat of a compound coating must be so intimately mixed that the texture, mouth feel and taste of the compound coating will approximate that of milk chocolate. The process wherein these ingredients are mixed to that required extent is referred to in the art as the conching step. As is well-known in the art, conching must pulvarize the sugar, cocoa and other ingredients to the point that the compound coating has no "gritty" texture or mouth feel and to the extent that the cocoa is mechanically worked into the fat.
Traditionally, the conching step takes place on a "concher" which operates with rolling pressure to slowly grind and pulvarize the sugar, cocoa and other ingredients into the fat.
Also, during the conching step, the moisture content of the ingredients is reduced to very low levels, i.e., to one percent or less and more often to 0.5 percent or less. Water sensitive emulsifiers, such as lecithin, are added near the end of the conching step when the moisture content has been reduced to the range of these lower levels.
The time required to complete a conching step of the foregoing nature will depend upon the quality of the compound coating desired. For better compound coatings up to 80 to 85 hours on the concher are required and even for the very poor and generally unacceptable grades of compound coatings, at least 8 hours will be required. While this operation requires a minimum of supervision, it does require extended amounts of power and the long use of relatively expensive capital equipment. Accordingly, it would be most desired in the art to provide a method of conching which will considerably shorten the conching time, but which will provide the superior quality of long conching time compound coatings.